Book Chapter: Re-imagining literacy: English in Hong Kong’s new university curriculum

Academic literacyTertiary-level English language provisionEnglish in the disciplines

Issue Date

2014

Publisher

Springer

Citation

Re-imagining literacy: English in Hong Kong’s new university curriculum. In Conium, DJ (Ed.), English Language Education and Assessment: Recent Developments in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland, p. 139-154. Singapore: Springer, 2014 How to Cite?

In September 2012, Hong Kong’s universities launched a 4-year undergraduate curriculum to replace the existing 3-year system, reducing the secondary school experience by 1 year and refocusing on a more holistic student-oriented approach to undergraduate education. A major element of the new curriculum is the provision of English in this new context, raising some key questions about the kind of English that we should be teaching. At the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the territory’s premier institute of higher learning, teachers in the Centre for Applied English Studies have chosen to completely rethink how they understand and deliver their courses. Here, students will be required to take 12 credits of English, double the current number, and half of these must be in the form of ‘English in the Discipline’. This recognises that because the conventions of academic communication differ considerably across disciplines, identifying the particular language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target groups becomes central to teaching English in universities. In this chapter, I outline what this means in practice and how the centre has gone about creating a more context-sensitive approach to English provision, based on closer cooperation with academic disciplines and research-informed course design.

Re-imagining literacy: English in Hong Kong’s new university curriculum. In Conium, DJ (Ed.), English Language Education and Assessment: Recent Developments in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland, p. 139-154. Singapore: Springer, 2014

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dc.identifier.isbn

9789812870704

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dc.identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10722/215832

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dc.description.abstract

In September 2012, Hong Kong’s universities launched a 4-year undergraduate curriculum to replace the existing 3-year system, reducing the secondary school experience by 1 year and refocusing on a more holistic student-oriented approach to undergraduate education. A major element of the new curriculum is the provision of English in this new context, raising some key questions about the kind of English that we should be teaching. At the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the territory’s premier institute of higher learning, teachers in the Centre for Applied English Studies have chosen to completely rethink how they understand and deliver their courses. Here, students will be required to take 12 credits of English, double the current number, and half of these must be in the form of ‘English in the Discipline’. This recognises that because the conventions of academic communication differ considerably across disciplines, identifying the particular language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target groups becomes central to teaching English in universities. In this chapter, I outline what this means in practice and how the centre has gone about creating a more context-sensitive approach to English provision, based on closer cooperation with academic disciplines and research-informed course design.

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dc.language

eng

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dc.publisher

Springer

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dc.relation.ispartof

English Language Education and Assessment: Recent Developments in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland

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dc.subject

Academic literacy

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dc.subject

Tertiary-level English language provision

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dc.subject

English in the disciplines

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dc.title

Re-imagining literacy: English in Hong Kong’s new university curriculum